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Slowing Down and Speeding Up Time

Lesson 7 from: Adobe After Effects for Beginners

Jeff Foster

Slowing Down and Speeding Up Time

Lesson 7 from: Adobe After Effects for Beginners

Jeff Foster

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Lesson Info

7. Slowing Down and Speeding Up Time

Lesson Info

Slowing Down and Speeding Up Time

We're going to get into timing and that's going to incorporate slo mo and time uh, time lapse and all those good things so let's get into those for a minute here and a couple of things came up during our lunch break to some questions on how do I change timing and doing some things on cops too? And we can actually get into that during this segment is well because it isn't just video footage. There are other things too. So just to show you an example of some slo mo um this is uh this is our dog kelowna she's often my text test subject and she's a belgian shepherd rescue dog that we she picked us out from the pound and she loves the attention. So I strapped a gopro honor sometimes and just turn her loose at the dog park. We did just that and that's her most favorite thing to do. So I made this little video where I shot everything with gopro's and all in a very high frame rate so I could then slowing down and after effects and cut it all together. And so this is that video it's called a go...

od day for a dog and let me play this for you two hundred forty frames per second and I three times down to thirty frames per second in aftereffects this is dog camp point of view under her neck she's she's just walking but she's walking quickly and smelling everything meeting other dogs I cut out all the butt sniffing so we don't see that it's not on here didn't need that but the long haired dogs looked great in slow booth water splashing looks cool slow motion here. Wait! A lot of people are asking earlier and throughout the day how long it takes you to build a project? Something like a boy depends on the project depends on the project if it's straight video like this it's a matter of selecting the clips like I could do this in premier or in after effects and slow it down just depends on what I'm doing with it. Really. But, you know, for re timing things that's pretty quick because you kind of get an idea. These are the cups cuts that I want to use from the different camera shots and it's just an editing decision. And then I'll show you how easy it is to re time something especially in aftereffects. It's probably it's almost the opposite of how you do things in premiere so it's a little interesting, but one setting cool really, really easy. Yeah, so this is almost over here wait and heading back home and they look pretty crazy with their head out the window in slow washing just a comment from noodle on it in the lounge this is a good idea would be funded narrate the dog's thoughts oh yeah definitely that would be fun. That would be fun indeed. Okay, so, um I've got some other other footage that we can actually show the project I didn't bring the project fall for that because it was it's kind of a moot point at this time were probably tired of looking at the dog so I'll bring in some other footage here, let me import um something here we come down to the correct area did you do now that music's gonna be stuck in my head so okay, it's good. Bring all these and so now I've got some to choose from let's see let's go with this is something that we did for a project recently for an infomercial type thing that we're building so I'm going tio let's see, that is this tells me my appear that's one thing too I didn't really get to show you earlier you may have seen it, but if I zoom in appear on the project panel when I click on a clip in the project panel all of its attributes are up pier so I can see that it's twelve eighty by seven twenty there's one instance of it in here there's there's, not multiple copies of it on its one hundred twenty frames per second or one one nine point eight eight o frames per second so this was shot at one hundred twenty frames per second with a gopro so what we'll do is we'll create a new cop that is our seven twenty by twelve eighty and we'll just leave that thirty frames per second and we'll drag this in here okay? And, uh it's kind of an over the top gag that uh cutting time in half so work literally cutting time in half here all safety precautions were made of course okay cut time black okay, so cutting time and half of course that has very little effect when you're looking at it in real time it's those like smash and okay all right, so let's slow that down and see if that looks any cooler when we slow it down so to do that let me come in here and trim out some of the time that we don't need well that's ok that it's in there um let's get right before the explosion is going to do this right before he cuts it and then right after going to go down about here pull this in now what I'm going to do here is move this down in my timeline and I really want to get that explosion of the pieces flying so I'm going to right click on it and go to time I can also access this from the, uh, the layer menu, but I like to right click right on the frames I know that's a frame I'm on, and I'm going here to time stretch time stretch can either stretch it out or it can compress it, make faster, so depending on your stretch factor, you can go by percentages and go up, so you're stretching it out, which is the opposite of what you do in premiere. So it's, if you're used to doing things and premier, this is just the opposite there we go higher percentage in premiere, it actually makes them shorter, so, um, so I'm going to stretch this out a bit, just couple hundred percent see what it looks like, and I I really didn't do any math figuring before I did that, I just want to see what it looks like when I stretch it out, I'm going to render this and then see what it looks like when I play it back in real time, so it slowed it down a little bit, but not not as much as I'd like to, so I'm just going to right click on it again and go to time and what time stretch and going to go higher on it goto see twenty disco for hundred percent, see what it looks like that point so again, this is another subjective thing unless you know exactly how many frames per second you want to go for a specific need sometimes doing it even by the math isn't good enough so that slows it down where it looks pretty darn cool I think you can really see the pieces flying has more impact is tio the exploding pieces when you're cutting it in half and that's just time stretches straight time stretch and that's giving you that slow motion feel from that that's a very straight ahead way of doing it of course to go the other way if you really want to speed something up, you go to time stretch and say I want to do really fast because I've got a long cliff and I'm trying to speed it up well, you could do that to um well just stretch these back out so that there is something to see otherwise it'll just be a blink and do a quick round preview it's gonna happen really fast now and go so time compression that's using the time stretch factor so that's that's one way to do things I've got um another one here let's see, I've got some that are shot at sixty peon typically those are let me toss that one aside I've got some here this is our horse running around, so I abuse my animals by making them pose for me to do things this is just straight forward sixty frames per second uh seven twenty asses right out of the camera and this is typical for dslr footage most the time people aren't going over sixty frames per second but they do want to slow something down so this I do know that timewise goto my time stretch and I'll go two hundred percent which will bring it to you know my thirty thirty frames per second playback because I'm in a thirty frames per second calm and that slows it down fifty percent and that just smoothed it out and that's good too if you have um you know, some kind of motion in your footage let me bring up the resolution a little bit I didn't realize that was only a half and that's actually making things look a little fuzzier so bring out the half because there were a half scale and so you see that doesn't slow it down a lot where it's like really slow mo but it just smoothed it out you know? You can tell it's slowed down a bit, but this is really good if you're editing things in um and you really want to show some motion, especially if you've shot something a little higher frame rate and again we can also slow it way down if we want to and go to say four hundred percent slow it way down, we might start seeing it get a little wonky here um, where it's looking a little stuttered so we'll see if that happens so this looks like slowed down footage now it doesn't look quite a smooth it looks like, oh, we've slowed something down intentionally and that's typically what you're going to see on low budget tv, so we we tend to not do it that much again. It's a bit of a subjective move if I go to three hundred percent, see if that's still smooth enough where it plays back naturally not quite as bad, not quite a stuttered looking that's dropping it down to about twenty frames per second and we're playing back at thirty there's a little bit of that hesitation there, but it it's smooth enough where it's at least usable at that point, but typically if I'm shooting something that sixty frames per second in a thirty frames per second cop, I'm not I'm going to go somewhere between two hundred three hundred percent to find that sweet spot by the math alone two hundred percent you shouldn't go over because then you're just you're matching frame rates at that point for for how many frames you have, so by the math, half of sixty is thirty and so that's how much you'd stretch it any questions on slow mo or time time shifting passion in the studio audience yes. So if you were to do this with the stabilizer, does it matter which one you do? First you would want teo you would want to stabilize first, probably because there's there's less data, you would have to actually make a sixty frames per second cop to do that because it'll only stabilized the size and the frame rate of the cop. So if I wanted to stabilize this footage after I did it, I'd either have to render it first and then bring that back in or I would have to make a comp from the original file, which is just dragging that over the comp window and then stabilize that and then I could I could retirement after that point question from verona kabo, who is from panama, does it affect the render when you apply time stretch not really it's just it's going to make a little longer clip, but as faras rendering no really it's it's a pretty pretty quick effect todo it it just adds more frames or decreases depending on which direction you're going to think like an accordion, you know you can stretch it or you khun you compress it? Yeah cool and ask him are asks can use mobile videos to do this type of work oh, any kind of video most definitely mobile videos typically are a set frame rate I believe I don't think you can really just frame rate in your iphone or whatever um but lars go pros you know small compact video cameras, big pro video cameras they all have adjustable frame rates and the higher the frame rate the more you can slow something down but the more expensive cameras can give you full frame higher frame rates then the little ones can and there's absolutely and you can use your iphone to do that as well yeah there's always aps to do everything so all right. Question from chris holman who was from musk ogan muskegon, michigan you say thankyou muskegon, michigan how can you eliminate the fuzziness when slowing down dsr footage uh, fuzziness being depends on how much you're slowing it down like I showed I went for hundred percent on this it seemed to be a little but if you have good high resolution footage like this is at if I go to full uh full quality and I can only show fifty percent of its actual frame here but if I go to one hundred percent and center it here will be able to see when I render this back uh the full resolution of this timed down so they're really the only fuzziness is going to be, um you know, what's inherent in the original footage itself so if there's some kind of motion blur in there and it's going to do that so cool and paolo photo ass how do you decide per project which capture you shoot in slow motion? Well, that's plan that's planning ahead yeah that's just prior planning if you know you're going to do something slow mo it's usually a b roll camera or something like that it's like I know I want these shots to be slow mo I'm gonna crank it up to sixty sixty p because if you're shooting everything like in film rate and we could get onto a whole topic of this I don't wanna go down a path we don't need teo, but if you're shooting everything say in twenty four p which is kind of the filmic great and you got a slower shutter going to get that nice smooth motion you get a lot of motion blur inherent through the footage of the camera then you want to show some slo mo to go with that then you're you know you can shoot your slo mo stuff planning ahead shooted at sixty p and bring it in and you're not going to get any motion blur but it's going to match that feel when you when you slow it down because it's like okay, here it isthe you're fast and then all of a sudden it's slow mo but it's gonna have that filming feel too because it just by nature slowing it down you're going to see more detail in less motion blur and again you can use the real smart motion blur plug in on that and add a little more motion blur back in and that helps too I think we're ready okay, cool. Uh, let's get into, um accomplice actually, let me show doing this to a comp and, uh, see if I could just bring another again. So import, I'll import another project uh, important file. I'm gonna come out here and grab a project file let's see, let's, go up to here, grab one that we know that we've done before. Um, grab this project's I've grabbed another entire project in here and so I've got my pineapple jump project. We've seen this before already today. So what if I was to make a new cop? Aaron, go three time pineapples, okay? And I'm going to grab the gun, put that back to black because I like that is my negative space in my composition settings I'm going to black go just makes the colors pop a little more. So I've got this new comp and I'm going to bring my pineapple jump cop inside here there we go, this isn't rendered, this is a sub comp that I brought in and I can every time that is well so if I go to time and then time stretch I can slow this down considerably I'll just go two hundred percent for now and we'll play that back this is without sound effects of course it's going through its render first so it's not really time until it plays back okay now it's playing back in real time so I took something that is created entirely and after effects I brought it into another comp and I've been able to slow down the timing and notice that all the motion player and everything is matching that slow motion just like I shot it in a higher frame rate it's now adjusted because it's all nested cops that's doing all the math all the way down deep now I could do the same thing by speeding it up hopes the time time stretch and we'll go to fifty percent which means it's going to be half fast half ass half fast no we don't want it the other way don't like to do it that way okay so now I sped it up well notice the motion blur has automatically adjusted for that motion in its math calculations so obviously they're done they're way gone long time before we're done here so let's bring this back and we can loop it there and see really fast and this is so again it's that it's that factor of nesting calms deeper and deeper and deeper uh you can do more things to them as if they were rendered out video footage this is shot at I think one hundred one hundred twenty I know this is shot at two forty of just traffic going by is locked off shot traffic going by on the street and he could see that the full frame everything is kind of strobe looking and whatnot but then when you shut it down and this is where he had dropped the bass in a dub step you know I got to do the sound effects to make this stuff work right? So as these cars go by and then slam down close oh that's what they do in the car commercials they shoot stuff really high frame rate and then as they come by though slowing down sing seal that wheels glisten in the shape of the car going by and everything that's basically what they're achieving here so let me get other and let me show you basically how that's done let's bring in uh piece of footage here and get back out to where our timing is on dh there and there and actually we'll pull it out of here. Um listen well let's go back and take it from one of these here let's see if she's here this is a good piece to try again this is sixty p this is probably more effective if you have a really hire hi frame rate uh piece of footage will do a new cop at thirty and leaving it all it's defaults we're going to run this in here because it's sixty and what I'll do is cem re timing and what kind of the re timing effect if we goto right click on it go to time and then time remapping what this allows you to do is to do some really crazy stuff with the timing we know we want to start here and we want to end here somehow so uh if I add in some key frames here that's going to add in a couple arbitrary key frames again doing things over time you can either slow down or speed up you could make some pretty crazy stuff with this too I'm laughing because it's probably going to look somewhat cartoonish just by moving those key frames so I'm affecting time in between those key frames so when it renders out it's going really fast and then let's go slow mo and then really fast again and it's that like old timey films saying it goes on there I don't know why that just makes you laugh you can't help it let's do just the opposite here let's uh slow down the beginning and the end and in the middle here we're going to speed that up with our retirement on ds and that she will be nice and slow here and and then so you can do that with any footage really it isn't it doesn't have to necessarily be really high frame rate to get that kind of an effect to it but you see that on tv and in commercials all the time you'll see something is almost like, you know really fast bullet time and then all of a sudden stop and the the person walks by really slow and then all of a sudden they take off and that's basically all there doing there taking layers of video footage and just changing the time remapping of it so you can speed something out and slow it down, speed it up or vice versa slow it down, play it normal and then speeded up so it just depends on the footage using to do that with and I've got an example of that again I'm sorry with the horse runs price sick of my horse and my dog by now but there's such perfect willing examples so this is one I did I've got a uh little phantom quadcopter with a gopro on it and I fly that around and sometimes I take it out to the horse and she plays with it so this is ahh little thing that I did with her and made a little production by do some of that re timing a lot of slow mo but then there's some re timing with their and there it is flying that's me flying that around her little drone going around and she likes to chase it around she plays with it it chases her and she chases it again this is that re timing our time mapping uh effect a drone so like a plane or well it's a little quadcopter okay no you didn't I missed I'm sorry way just have one she's bored it out with a bunch of other horses I don't write it all right now she's um she just turned five and we're still working with her had her since she was a baby but it will be western won't be english no I don't do that I'm not I'm not built for osage I get into more less slo mo and more of the uh read read time defect right about in here somewhere so I want to let this run second you can see all of those time changes you see the cars in the background slow down when I changed the timing too and it kind of just freezes time of it it's pretty cool I think there's one more spot in here right did some radical changes I'll let that run for just another minute it's almost done here right in here goes back to real time this kind of thing this kind of project is this is where it is good to shoot it a higher frame ring because if you're going to shut it down that much you don't want you know motion blur in there because then you just got to get that stair step the effect of of things that should be in motion art especially got cars and stuff moving to the background she does something like that you want to see the hair actually move you don't want to see a blurry hit there so you really want teo capture all that that's where she wants bite it if you're familiar to go pro it's you know it's a little camera that really super wide angle lens on it so for her to be that close I mean she's literally just about a foot away from to get that close to it okay won't bore you with my horse's but uh but that's you know that's re timing remapping the time on that's just a really cool effect again that's something that's used a lot but people are starting to use it more more and more because it's just kind of a cool effect to do to your even your mundane videos you can you can do some cool things with it so the last part of this whole time time sequence here is doing time lapse a time lapse is a little bit different let's uh close this project and I'm going to import a stack of files so we go here on dh go teo um we'll be in here think it's in here oh, there it is time lapse and this is a stack of files that was shot from a gopro just mounted inside this place it's a it's a little pub and they had a band come in and set up and start playing and I just did time lapse where it would take a like a take a photo like every few seconds and then by stacking all those images up u make this really fast time lapse image so as I showed you before, I can do this as a j peg sequence so I'm just grabbing the smallest number in there the lowest number select j peg sequence and I open that up and that comes in as a single unit it's za stack of images so it comes in just like it's a piece of footage now if I just bring it in uh as it is it's going to take the aspect ratio and everything of it so if I play it back we just do a quick render here. So this actually just come kind of is the compressed period of time and as it goes, the sun goes down, the lights come up to people come in and and things happen it's kind of like nothing's happening here in the beginning, but then all of a sudden activity starts coming up on dh trust me things happen people are in there, theo van starts setting up playing but it all happens fairly quickly boy I didn't know it was that much time before anything happened let me get in here a bit and scrub in and this is the raw five got one finished and color corrected and smooth and everything so I went in and d noise did so that was all cool too so let's uh let's render it off little maher there's the band started command set up and before long they start playing and people are dancing eso time lapse has done a lot a lot of landscape stuff you'll see clouds moving and sun setting cars moving and all types of things you could do time lapse with anything if you have a dslr interval ometer so you can take time pictures on with higher res images and better cameras obviously you're going to have better results but uh this is just a really quick way of getting something to play back uh in time lapse and this is pretty silly here because they're going so fast now in this case because they are it's looking kind of comical I would probably I do two things actually do a bunch of things to this footage I would probably go into time and I would do a time stretch and I actually stretch it out a little bit so that wasn't quite so fast so I'd stretch that out then I would go in I do some color correction maybe throw de noise air filter on there and a red giant makes a great d noise ir filter. So does um uh, boris there's some great third party filters out there. You can go to my website, my blog's site pixel painter dot com you'll see I've done some reviews on different products that I think you're worth while so go through my block and you'll see some recommendations there. So, um, let's uh, let's take a look at the finished piece hear me hide this here and there's one here that I've already this is that shot obviously cleaned up quite a bit and color corrected indy noise see it's usable footage at this point? Yeah, its raw state it's kind of ugly, but this kind of thing is easy to de noise because it does two things it when you use the d noise air on it, it takes all of that noise, the pixelated noise out of low light situations, it takes that out, plus that actually introduces a little bit in motion blur for these people that are kind of ghosted in there. They're ghosted in time anyway because it was a slow shutter in a dark room, so teo, to see them moving there almost ghost like because they're not quite, uh, picked up so it's uh, kind of a cool effect

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Vanessa Mckinney
 

Thank you for this class. It has been very helpful in helping me understand the concept of AE and pushing me pass my fears of this platform. I have shared this with others because I truly find it amazing.

Tomas Verver
 

It's a good basic course about After Effects. As part of the subscrubtion this is a nice course. For a fullprice course there courses available witrh more content, lessions available on other platforms.The course is aimed at absolute beginners. Its not a complete course.

Alex Gulland
 

I am struggling a bit with this course, especially with 3D; I think my After Effects might be more up-to-date than the one that Jeff is working with.

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